AT&T Fiber will be in (parts of) 45 metros by end of 2016.

Share this story

AT&T yesterday announced another 11 metro areas where it plans to install gigabit fiber Internet. So far, AT&T Fiber is available in 29 metro areas in the US, and another 38 (including those announced this week) are slated to get the service eventually.

AT&T did not say when these areas will actually get service. The company said it will have deployed in 45 metro areas by the end of 2016, including the 29 already being served. The 11 newly announced areas are presumably among those that won't get service until at least 2017.

AT&T has not been installing fiber throughout the entirety of each metro area, so just living in one of these cities won't guarantee you the fast Internet service. Overall, AT&T said it is on track to deploy fiber to 12.5 million customer locations by mid-2019, meeting a requirement imposed by the Federal Communications Commission when AT&T bought DirecTV. So far, the service is available to more than 3 million homes, apartments and small businesses. Unfortunately, a large majority of homes inside AT&T's 21-state wireline territory will continue to be served by slower DSL lines.

Prices are higher in some areas than others, though. Generally, AT&T has been charging $70 a month for gigabit Internet in cities where Google Fiber also operates, and an extra $20 in cities where it doesn't face such competition. Google Fiber isn't in any of AT&T's 11 newly announced metro areas, and AT&T did not announce pricing for those areas.

AT&T formerly called its fiber Internet "GigaPower" but has changed the name to AT&T Fiber and said it "will announce additional network technologies and products" under that brand in the near future. AT&T is also phasing out the U-verse brand, calling its non-fiber services AT&T Internet.

AT&T provides unlimited data to gigabit Internet customers, while imposing data caps of anywhere from 150GB to 1TB on other customers. Some customers have the option of purchasing unlimited data for another $30 a month, and they can also be upgraded to unlimited data by subscribing to AT&T TV or DirecTV service. Customers who exceed their data caps are automatically charged $10 for each additional 50GB allotment.

Promoted Comments

My metro area and city are one of the ones in which AT&T has already introduced gigabit service, but, like many in the same city, I am still not in their service area (despite being within a couple blocks of an enormous AT&T networking center). It would be nice if they actually built it out in the existing cities first.

(To be clear, this is not an AT&T specific problem – in the areas I've seen Google Fiber is, if anything, even worse in this respect.)